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Part of the reason for the continuing fight for reproductions rights around the world is because of the health of women. But if a woman dies because of something preventable when it comes to this situation, it is somehow unfair to talk about the death of the woman.

B!U!L!L! F!U!C!K!I!N!G! S!H!I!T!

That is exactly why the struggle continues, so no woman has to die like Savita did.

The doctor weighing in is very useful. A midwife named Clare was insisting in comments on Mick Nugent’s post that abortion wasn’t indicated at all, the standard of care was monitoring and antibiotics. Jen Gunter makes very clear what a crock of shit that is.

How can you be “pro-life” when you allow a young woman to die because of a fetus? Doesn’t make sense.

Didn’t know that Ireland was so strongly in the grip of the Catholic Church. Thought its citizens were shaking off the Church’s influence and power. Maybe this will help push them in the right direction.

How can you be “pro-life” when you allow a young woman to die because of a fetus?

What I’m gathering is that a pregnant young woman who doesn’t want to be pregnant must by definition be a slut, so she deserves what’s coming to her and on the Christianist “life scale” ranks somewhere below a dying foetus. Probably right around where “flatworm” is located.

It’s funny. We have to wait until after an “independent investigation” before assigning blame to the Catholic church. You know, after everyone’s forgotten their outrage at this particular injustice.

Is it too cynical to assume that the investigation will find that doctors involved are blameless because there was just enough uncertainty about the cause of her pain, and that religion clearly was not to blame either because it’s fuzzy warm goodness incarnate.

A woman is dead who most likely didn’t have to die, and everyone is expected to avoid the obvious cause out of some misplaced respect for other people’s beliefs.

It should be noted that Symphysiotomy is a legitimate procedure to be used when Caesarean section is not, for a variety of medical reasons, an option. The was, however, no medical justification in any of the described cases. Absolutely horrid.

This is one of the most contentious operations in this book. One school of thought considers it a ”[…]barbarous operation done by expatriate doctors on the mothers of the developing world[…]” Another school, which includes all our contributors who practise obstetrics, considers it an invaluable operation which needs to be reinstated and given its proper place

O.o

apparently this is the reason Kenyan women are subjected to this torture

Don’t forget that there’s a bunch of dude tossers hashing the “are women incubator-chattel” debate over at Reasonable Doubts. Today of all days. Right now I hate all the human beings. We suck. We are so unlike furry and adorable animals.

I was reading the comments at some of the links and some said how “safe” Ireland was for women. This does not sound safe to me… it just sounds like they have been lucky, so far. Now they’ve killed someone with this outrageous religious idea. And yeah. People are going to get the strange idea that this has an awful lot to do with the ideology of the Catholic Church.

kestrel – well if you rule this woman as having died from infection, and do the same for so many other women who Totally.Don’t.Die.Due.To.Pregnancy. guess what? Your stats do indeed show you to be a country safe for pregnant women.

There are two kinds of midwives. One is a certificate midwife and the other is a nurse practitioner midwife. The NPM is the real deal. The Certificate midwife is infamous in medical circles in western obstetrics for being a flogger of every kind of woo known to man. Particularly in the USA and Australia where this kind of woo exists.

This is probably that kind of midwife who weighed in. Nurse Practitioner Midwives don’t faff around since they are scientifically trained professionals.

Do we wait for a court order to allow intubation? Emergency fluids? Amputation?

I seem to recall seeing court cases involving all of those.

this is why I think the problem needs to be stemmed at the root; the irrational imaginary twaddle called religion, instead of trying to get lawmakers to act against what are often their own best personal interests.

change the messages these authoritarian fuckwits are spewing, and make them tame for the rest of the thinking population.

it’s really the only way, in the end.

I mean, what are the alternatives? none, I say. the only things that will work are reversing the lies that got us into this mess to begin with. lies told by the likes of falwell, robertson, akin, limbaugh, beck, etc. these are paid stoolies who are created to spew very specific messages that are designed to inflame RWA personalities to get them to vote as a block.

you either have to outbreed the RWAs (good luck with that), or else simply change the lies they are told to something less destructive to other people’s rights.

Allow me to introduce the catholic right in Ireland. This gobshite is someone I read every now and then to get the heart pumping as I realise I still share a country where these fuckwits make up part of the electorate and many of his ilk are cowaring in the Dail hoping to pass the parcel to someone else so they don’t have to make a decision.

I just crunched up in my chair. My knees moved towards the belly, my arms hugged them, just reading about this.
Sick bastards, all of them.
I’m not going to be nice, or kind, or patient. I’m not going to listen to “but it was secular law” as if that popped into existence independently of the culture of that place.
I’m going to scream and shout at you if you defend those sick bastards with one word.
And I’m damn well going to hold it against you if you remain a member of that sick cult.
That woman died because she was denied an abortion.
She was refused to have one because the law is unclear and therefore peoplemrelied on their catholic faith to make the decision. Why is the law unclear? Because politicians for 20 years didn’t want to touch the issue with a 10ft pole because of the RCC. It’s religion all the way down

….in comments at Jezebel someone pointed out that Eoghan O’Dwyer, himself, the Galway dr who said that women never die from lack of abortions at that symposium was also one of the symphysiotomy practicers, is ALSO on record claimng that the women who said they had lasting disability from it, were just lying!!

Yep, and they practised that barbaric thing until 1983(!) That’s 4 years after I was born, 4 years after my cousin made his appearance by C-section, the year my friend was born via C-section, to happy, healthy mothers.

Short version: woman was declared cancer free after a long fight and then decided to get pregnant. 26 weeks in, the cancer returned. She didn’t have long to live, but still wanted radiation and chemo therapy. Her doctors disagreed and went to court to force her to have a c-section. The baby died about two hours after the procedure and she died two days later.

Oh and who was one of the only two organizations filing an amicus brief to side with the hospital in the subsequent trial? The fucking Catholic Church.

This may seem like a minor quibble given the situation, but…why are we all calling Dr. Halappanavar “Savita”? I’m not a personal acquaintance of hers and I doubt most people here are either. It feels to me like a microaggression to refer to her by first name.

This may seem like a minor quibble given the situation, but…why are we all calling Dr. Halappanavar “Savita”? I’m not a personal acquaintance of hers and I doubt most people here are either. It feels to me like a microaggression to refer to her by first name.

Huh? People are referring to their first name due to a reflexive emotional response and are trying to convey a strong personal support.

Also because I imagine many white people would have trouble pronouncing her last name.

If you say so. The only man I can remember being referred to by his first name regularly in the media is Saddam Hussein. And that was not an expression of sympathy. Occasionally, both first and last names will be used, i.e. Matthew Shepard, but I can’t think of any instances of men being referred to by first name only. Of course, no men end up in this situation anyway…

Also, I don’t think any disrespect is meant on anyone here’s part. It’s just a habit people get into. The computer store Babbage and the software Ada. The candidates vying for the Democratic nomination in a US presidential election a few years ago: Obama and Hilary. And so on.

oh i forgot to post this link last night, Georgia Rep. Terry England (R) says its okay to let women just suffer like this bc on his farm thats how they deal with bovine miscarriages (lots of veterinarians went huh?? to this at the time) when sponosring a fetal heartbeat bill here this past year….

Frankly, I rather call a woman by her own name than Ms. husband’s surname. Especially in politics (since we’re mentioning Hilary), being mentally connected to her husband every time she is mentioned could weaken a woman’s position. She needs to be her own political entity instead of Ms someone.

I rather call a woman by her own name than Ms. husband’s surname. Especially in politics (since we’re mentioning Hilary), being mentally connected to her husband every time she is mentioned could weaken a woman’s position.

She does have her own last name. IIRC, she started using her husband’s to help his political career, i.e. to satisfy those who got all hyper about a woman having a different last name than that of her domestic partner. But at this point Hilary Clinton is the major active politician and Bill is some elder statesman sort who appears periodically when he needs an attention fix. Why shouldn’t the media acknowledge that by referring to her as Clinton and Bill as Bill Clinton (assuming she doesn’t want to go back to using Rodham?)

Is it too cynical to assume that the investigation will find that doctors involved are blameless…

Nope. Perhaps not nearly cynical enough.

I started to comment last night that following the investigation, the government would do some handwaving about fixing the process. Well, here you go. They didn’t even wait for the investigation to start the spin.

Per this Reuters article, “Irish law does not specify under what circumstances the threat to the life or health of the mother is high enough to justify a termination, leaving doctors to decide.” The European Court of Human Rights ruled…TWO years ago!…that Ireland must clarify this law.

Now that some is dead, the politicians decide to do something about it. And by the time they’re done…who knows.

Is it too cynical to assume that the investigation will find that doctors involved are blameless…

Nope. Heck, I’ll go you one more cynical. They’ll throw the doctors under the bus and claim that it was all their fault for misunderstanding Ireland’s perfectly sensible and humane laws, which don’t need to be altered in the least. Then they’ll arrest the next doctor who gets a case like this and does go ahead and save the patient’s life, thus reestablishing the status quo of no abortion ever.

It’s really hard with this case. I want doctors to pay because they obviously could have saved her, even constrained by the law (because of the exception for life threatening condition), but I also want this to change the overall law. If nothing else, make the part about exceptions clearer. Preferably, make abortions on demand available, but at least making more (and more clear exceptions) would be a good start.

I hope both these things can be dealt with, instead of blaming one side to the point of absolving the other. (The laws are horrible, and they should be the primary concern, but these doctors really shouldn’t be in a position where they can play with a pregnant woman’s life ever again.)

Beatrice, I agree. From the information available in the articles, it doesn’t sound like they even tried to save her. Possibly out of sheer ego or placing ideology above patient care or maybe out of overt incompetence. But I don’t see any permanent change happening until the law changes. And I can see lawmakers using the admittedly obvious incompetence of the practitioners as an excuse to not change the law.

It will be interesting to see whether Enda Kenny’s fiery speech about the Cloyne Report and his declaration that canon law has no place in Irish society will hold true. Given how they bungled this in the last 20 years and did nothing, I have my doubt that the debate will be free of Catholic law. He has already indicated that he intents to downplay this.

This may seem like a minor quibble given the situation, but…why are we all calling Dr. Halappanavar “Savita”? I’m not a personal acquaintance of hers and I doubt most people here are either. It feels to me like a microaggression to refer to her by first name.

While this point is generally correct, in this context, given the issues here and the fact that everyone on this blog is calling Savita by her first name in an empathetic, supportive, humanizing manner, it is indeed a minor quibble vanishing on the horizon of picayune.